McDonald’s Germany boosts planning efficiency and speed

McDonald’s Deutschland is the German arm of the global restaurant chain McDonald’s, operating 1,489 restaurants all over Germany. Some 92% of its restaurants are operated on a franchise basis. The ongoing planning and reporting for its restaurants make an important contribution toward the continuing development of McDonald’s Germany in line with group management requirements.

The company wanted to migrate the planning and budgeting infrastructure from on-premises Hyperion Planning to the cloud to ensure that the company benefited from current and future technical developments.

Also, it hoped to boost planning and budgeting efficiency and flexibility without higher costs and/or longer processing times, while enabling full transparency into the planning and budgeting process to gain a better picture of overall budgets and use of resources.

The system needed to be scalable so that new cloud services could be developed and tested as required, without having to commit too early or too extensively to new hardware or computing power.

The company wanted to reduce or completely eliminate system downtime, especially during maintenance or upgrades.

McDonald's also needed to reduce dependency on the in-house IT infrastructure to slash fixed costs and minimize maintenance and upgrade costs.

"When it came time to replace our outdated planning infrastructure, Oracle was our vendor of choice given that it is a longstanding, much-appreciated partner of McDonald’s—in both the USA and Germany," said Tim Deege, senior manager of finance systems for McDonald’s Deutschland. In addition, McDonald's valued the performance, functionality, and flexibility of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, "with which we are perfectly prepared for the future," he said.
 

McDonald’s Deutschland migrated the entire corporate planning function to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, ensuring that the company could use state-of-the-art planning tools that met any foreseeable requirements.

It achieved planning and budgeting time and efficiency gains—such as reducing deployment times by up to 50%—with improved system performance. The time required to transition newly developed applications from a test to a production environment was cut by up to 80%.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud allowed the company to develop and test new cloud services without entering into long-term financial commitments for infrastructure. Also, McDonald's Deutschland replaced capital expenditure for infrastructure with the usage-based monthly subscription model of Oracle Cloud, helping the company to monitor its planning and budgeting costs on an ongoing basis and allocate costs to respective users.

The company gained maximum planning and budgeting efficiency and flexibility, reducing costs and processing times even if, in the future, more detailed planning and reports are required—since the cloud is updated regularly with new capabilities.

Oracle EPM Cloud helped McDonald’s Deutschland's corporate planning comply with the data privacy provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Downtime was eliminated for maintenance or troubleshooting. Patches and upgrades are installed with no interruption to service, making the system available at all times to corporate management and all connected restaurants.

The self-explanatory user interface of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud facilitated user acceptance and enabled intuitive operation.